A new alliance of Winter Park commissioners is ready to thumb its nose at a historic preservation rule and return to the good old days of four months ago.

Mayor Steve Leary, Commissioner Sarah Sprinkel and newly elected Pete Weldon want to resurrect a rule that 67 percent of a neighborhood must agree to form a historic district.

Last December, when a former commission majority reduced that threshold to 50 percent plus one, Sprinkel and Leary opposed it. Now Weldon is in their camp and leading the charge as part of a new majority. He won his seat by defeating incumbent Tom McMacken, an avid preservationist.

City residents don’t want to be forced into historic districts, Weldon insisted, likening them to homeowners associations. Requiring a 67 percent vote would create “a more friendly attitude among the neighbors.”

Sprinkel and Leary blamed the 50-percent-plus-one vote for making things “divisive” in the city.

Commissioner Carolyn Cooper saw it another way. Weldon won by less than 51 percent and the library bond issue by only 51 percent, she said. “Fifty percent plus one is democracy.”

Commissioner Greg Seidel argued he has seen no negative effects from the lower threshold and, besides, no neighborhoods have sought to form a historic district since December. Raising the threshold back to 67 percent, he said, would surely be divisive and would keep the commission from addressing more important matters, such as traffic and underground power lines. “This will just distract us,” he said. He bluntly challenged the board. “If you guys really don’t like it [the historic ordinance] that much, why don’t you just vote it out? You’re going to have the same uproar.”

Later, Seidel questioned what the commission was doing to address residents’ biggest concern. “When I ran for election, the big campaign issue was, What was I going to do to save the character of the city?” he said. “What I see the vote doing today is going in the opposite direction.”

The mayor disagreed. Leary listed three projects – the current golf course refurbishing, the Rollins College Alfond Inn and the new civic center/library – as evidence of recent actions that save the city’s character. When Seidel noted that residents might see some of those as problems, Leary shrugged. “There you go. You’re going to have an argument on everything.”

Despite the meeting’s strongly worded exchanges, commissioners reached significant compromises on historic preservation. They rejected an “opt-out” clause that would have let homeowners off the hook if they didn’t like their historic district’s rules. Leary and Sprinkel said they were satisfied reinstituting the 67 percent requirement. Commissioners also agreed to include “voluntary preservation” as a way to achieve the ordinance’s objectives, and to develop a  more detailed process for deciding a structure’s historic value.

Most commissioners also agreed the Historic Preservation Board should keep its power to grant variances to historic structures. Weldon had wanted to give that power to the Board of Adjustment, which is tougher on allowing exceptions to the building code. He said some people list their houses as historic to “game the system” and more easily receive variances..

Several residents at the meeting objected to returning to the 67 percent rule.”Let the ink dry on the paper before we change it,” said Drew Krecicki. “Let’s chill out and give it a year.”

Frank Hamner, who assisted the task force that last year revised the preservation ordinance, said the only other times the city demands a 67 percent vote is when a neighborhood  decides whether to tax itself to make improvements, such as to put in sidewalks.

No dates have been set for the public hearings and formal votes on the proposed changes.

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Commissioner Peter Weldon is a man of his word. The following video captures one of Weldon’s most direct and articulate campaign promises – to reverse what he sees as the negative aspects of the current Historic Preservation Ordinance.

He delivered this speech at the November 23, 2015 Commission meeting, where the Historic Preservation Ordinance had just passed the first reading on a 3-2 vote.

To read entire story, click here.

At his first Commission meeting as a newly-elected Commissioner, Weldon presented a three-page document to fellow Commissioners outlining changes he would make to the existing historic preservation ordinance. To read the entire document, click here.

The Three-Step Weldon Plan

The first of three steps Weldon proposed is to “encourage voluntary preservation and protection of historic structures. . . .”

Voluntary designation of individual homes has seen an encouraging uptick recently. It is difficult to understand, however, how these individually designated homes would voluntarily protect themselves, especially if they change ownership. It would seem that some municipal authority would have to come into play to protect these homes, either from demolition or from out of scale renovation, which could conceivably affect the new owners’ property rights.

Two-Thirds Vote for Historic District

The second step would be to reverse the measure that requires a 50 percent plus one vote to designate an historic district. That threshold would revert to a two-thirds vote under the Weldon plan.

Several comments on this website have observed that the City has received no applications for historic districts since the revised ordinance passed in December 2015, begging the question of how long it takes to get 50 percent plus one of Winter Parkers to agree to anything – much less two-thirds.

Opt-Out Provision

Step three involves an “opt-out” provision, exempting any owner voting against inclusion in a proposed district from “Certificate of Review oversite [sic]” unless their property has already been designated at the time of the vote.

National Register Status

Weldon goes on to propose issues for study and recommendation by the Historic Preservation Board. Among those is the matter of incentives for voluntary designation. He suggests that one incentive for owners of historically significant properties is “to help owners apply for National Register status and then to provide a small level of City support for maintaining such properties when National Register status is granted.”

National Register designation does convey a certain cache to the structure and recognition to the owner. It does not, however, provide any protection. Only the City has the power to protect its historic assets.

If the City chooses to do so.

The Commissioners agreed to take up Weldon’s proposal at the coming April 11, 2016 meeting.

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